Curious if anyone has any experience with tools specifically for monitoring
multicast. Finds where the trees are, paths they are on, tracks all
senders/receivers per group, handles PIM-SM, RPs, MSDP, MDT Tunnels over
MPLS VPN, etc. Such as Cisco Multicast Manager, EMC Ionix Multicast
Manager, CA Spectrum? The good and the bad? Worth the effort/investment?
Thanks
Interesting question, I'd like to know more about this myself. I'm so used to monitoring SNMP-based
devices, never really thought about multi-casts and being able to see the pattern/tree....
Interesting question, I'd like to know more about this myself. I'm so used
to monitoring SNMP-based
devices, never really thought about multi-casts and being able to see the
pattern/tree....
Shameless plug, I once developed a tool which was called multicast
weathermap. You can see what remains of it here:
http://netmon.grnet.gr/multicast-map.shtml
(hover over the nodes and the links and you can see various useful info)
(you can see the tree of a specific group by selecting from the drop down
list at the bottom)
and the presentation here
http://tnc2004.terena.org/programme/presentations/show2c2c.html?pres_id=47
Since I too myself am into multicast, I intended to incorporate into it
everything needed to know everything. But eventually it was left as it is.
Apart from that, the NNM advanced used to have a multicast plugin, and it
was fairly usable. You could take a look at it probably, but I don't know
whether it can handle those MPLS cases you mention.
Lastly, those guys at Poznan used to work on a tool called Muvi
http://muvi.man.poznan.pl/
You may want to take a look, although I fear it too has been abandoned.
Best Regards,
Athanasios
Wow that looks great! The URL has an extra "dot" before the SHTML though when you click on it.
Easy fix though. Are there no commercial applications for this kind of monitoring?
I see your graphs are powered by MRTG. =)
I've never seen or used those vendor-specific tools so I can't comment
on them. IP multicast can be extremely complex. I'd be interested in
hearing if they are any good and what is good about them if so.
There have been a handful of community built tools over the years, but
nothing as I recall is very comprehensive. What is available now tends
to be a defunct research project or simply no longer supported.
CAIDA has a small list of some older tools here:
<http://www.caida.org/tools/taxonomy/multicast.xml>
Marshall Eubanks had one of the best global views of IP multicast, but
it too does not appear to be supported any longer:
<http://www.multicasttech.com/status/>
I had a very cheesey SNMP-based cli tool that grabbed some numbers of
useful IP multicast-related OIDs that probably still works:
<http://aharp.ittns.northwestern.edu/software/mcastsum>
There were a couple of multicast beacon projects, which was a useful
way to see how others view your IP multicast connectivity and vice
versa. Doesn't look like those are running any longer I'm afraid.
I've thought about reincarnating some things I've done or building on
some prior work, but there seems to be so little call for IP multicast
tools that I haven't been able to justify the time investment. I'd be
interested in hearing if there are lots of folks now clamoring for
something.
John
Is it just me, or is anyone else receiving multiple copies of this same
message?
~Seth
9 Copies here.
The headers seem to show a bit of bouncing around inside cisco.com
From: Seth Mattinen [mailto:sethm@rollernet.us]
Sent: Wednesday, 21 July 2010 12:22 PM
To: nanog@nanog.org
Subject: Re: Multicast Network Monitoring>
> Interesting question, I'd like to know more about this myself. I'm so
> used to monitoring SNMP-based devices, never really thought about multi-
casts and being able to see the pattern/tree....
>
>Is it just me, or is anyone else receiving multiple copies of this same
message?
9 Copies here.
The headers seem to show a bit of bouncing around inside cisco.com
Maybe they are having issues with their multicast mail routing protocol.
Regards
Marshall
Looks like their mmrpf (multicast mail reply path forwarding) is broken 
Antonio Querubin
808-545-5282 x3003
e-mail/xmpp: tony@lava.net
Or.. perhaps someone over there just turned on smrp routing ?
You know.. SMRP ( Sadistic Mail Replication Protocol ) <g>
I was wondering what was going on. Kinda tired of seeing my own emails over and over!!!!